This is Part 3 in a 3-part series on Habit Eating.

(1) How Habits Can Control Your Eating
(2) 3 Proven Strategies for Breaking Habits
(3) 2 Key Principles in Creating New Habits

Habits are automatic behavior cued by context (where you are, what you’re doing), performed without intention, and with minimal thought. In Part 1 of this series I described how they’re created and why. In Part 2, I described three strategies for blocking or interrupting habits that have already been cued. In this third and last article in the series, I will describe the most effective way to break a habit – avoiding the cue – and how to create new, positive habits.

There are thousands of blog posts about how to break habits and create new ones. My advice will be a little different. As with the previous articles in this series, the strategies I recommend are based on controlled studies written by psychologists and published in refereed professional journals.

Avoid Habit Cues – Take Advantage of Transitions

Hands down, experts agree that the best way to break a habit is to avoid the contexts that cue the habit. There is also consensus that the most effective way to do this (some say the only way) is through major life change: moving to a new town, entering college, graduating from college, changing jobs, getting married, getting divorced, having a baby, etc.

During these natural life transitions, cues are gone, you stop acting out of habit, and you think about everything you do rather than acting automatically. Everything is open to reevaluation. You try new things and decide what you like and don’t like. You meet new people, make new friends.

Retailers love people in transition because they are the most open to trying new brands and products. To identify them, they buy lists, or hire statisticians to create multivariate models. And then they shower them with advertising in the hope that they will establish a new habit that includes heavy shopping at their store.

A time when you have no habits is a time when you are creating new habits. No one knows this better than retailers, but you should know it, too. If you are aware that you are establishing new habits, you can act deliberately and not squander the opportunity. You have a choice: will you create good habits or bad habits?

Take, for example, the transition of marriage. Both men and women tend to gain weight in the first two years of marriage, with women gaining more. New habits are established with marriage, and apparently they typically involve eating more. It’s hard to say what new habits cause the weight gain without more information. But if you thought about what you were eating as a newlywed in terms of new habits, you probably could identify the bad habits and avoid them.

This same principle goes for other transitions. When you become a parent, for example, you don’t have to create a new habit of eating your child’s leftovers. Life changes drastically when a child is born. Be especially careful at times like these not to fall into bad habits that will plague you long term.

If your life isn’t in transition, it’s not as easy to avoid cues. But there still can be opportunities. Look around you and think about your patterns. Here’s a common one. Remove snack foods from counter tops. Just seeing cookies and crackers is a cue for many people. When they are in view, you take a handful. When they are in a cabinet, you don’t.

In Part 2 I talked about how to block habits after they were cued – for example, how to sit in front of the TV without mindlessly eating. It’s much easier without the cue. If you have a habit of eating in front of the TV, watch less TV. If you have a habit of eating while surfing the internet, find something else to do. Take a walk, call a friend, or clean out your closet.

They have a saying in AA: "Don’t go to a barber shop if you don’t want a hair cut." Newly sober people are strongly urged to avoid the places where they used to drink and the people they used to drink with – their habit cues. AA doesn’t teach newly sober people how to go to a bar and not drink. They say, "Don’t go to bars!"

Tip: The easiest way to break old habits is to avoid the contexts that cue them. Use transitions to your benefit.

Create Positive New Habits

How do you create a habit? It’s not just repetition, as many people think. It’s been said that if you do something every day for 30 days it will become a habit. That’s not necessarily so. Here’s why.

Habits are learned as people pursue goals in their daily lives. In the learning phase, the "habit loop" has three parts: a stable context, a routine, and a reward. The loop must repeat many times before it’s stored in habit memory. In a naturally created habit, the reward causes you to repeat the loop – i.e. the routine is very rewarding. Over time, the context becomes associated with the routine. Once the routine becomes a habit, the reward becomes irrelevant and the routine is cued only by the context (see the popcorn study in Part 2). But the reward is a crucial part of habit formation.

There must be a strong and consistent sense of reward for a behavior you’re repeating to be stored in habit memory. This is because storage in habit memory requires dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps control the brain’s reward and pleasure centers. If the routine doesn’t feel rewarding to you, if it’s not pleasurable on some level, it will never become a habit. Nothing you do over and over while hating every second of it will ever become a habit.

I discovered this in my own life – the hard way. Some years ago, I decided that I would develop a habit of jogging every morning. I’ve never liked jogging because my aerobic capacity has always been limited, even as a child, despite being a normal weight and getting regular exercise. I’ve since learned that aerobic capacity is genetically determined and you can’t improve it beyond a narrow range. But I didn’t know that at the time and I thought I could improve.

Every morning for three months I got up and jogged (as best I could) for two miles. I never improved, and I absolutely hated it. The feeling of insufficient oxygen in my body was agony. After three months I decided I was done with that, and never looked back. No habit was created, despite many repetitions, because I found the behavior completely unrewarding. There was very little dopamine in my brain after jogging.

If you want to establish a new habit, don’t suffer through something for 30 days with the idea that it will magically stick. It won’t. If you want to make a new habit of daily exercise or healthy eating, then you need to find a way to do it that’s fun for you and fits your lifestyle. That is the piece that is missing from most articles about creating new habits. I’ve seen a lot of focus on tricks for making you repeat the new behavior. That’s okay, but if the behavior is intrinsically rewarding, it won’t be that hard to get yourself to repeat it. If it’s not intrinsically rewarding, you can repeat it forever and it won’t become a habit.

Tip: If a behavior is not rewarding, it will never become a habit, no matter how often it’s repeated.

This is the third and last article in the series on Habit Eating. I hope it was useful!

Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear them.

This is Part 2 in a 3-part series on Habit Eating.

(1) How Habits Can Control Your Eating
(2) 3 Proven Strategies for Breaking Habits
(3) 2 Key Principles in Creating New Habits

In Part 1 of this series, I described what habits are, how they are created, and how you can tell the difference between emotional eating and habit eating. It takes many rewarded repetitions for a habit to be created and that’s good, because once habits are created they are extremely hard to break. Habits are automatic behavior cued by context (where you are, what you’re doing), performed without intention, and with minimal thought. When performing a habit your mind is not engaged, and that’s a huge obstacle to change. Resolving to do better, an effective strategy for non-habits, doesn’t help with habits, though thousands of blog posts offer this type of advice.

In researching this article, I read controlled studies written by psychologists and published in refereed professional journals to find out what really works. There are two general strategies: (1) avoid the context that cues the habit routine, or (2) block or interrupt the habit routine after it’s been cued. Avoiding cues is most effective, but not always practical. I’ll talk about that in Part 3 since it’s related to creating new habits. In this article I’ll describe three strategies for blocking or interrupting habit routines after they’ve been cued.

From Automatic Action to Intentional Control

What makes habit eating so difficult to manage is that it’s performed automatically, without goals or intentions. Eating is cued by context, regardless of hunger level or the taste of the food. A pair of studies by Neal, Wood, Wu and Kurlander demonstrated the problem, and found an interesting way around it. It was published in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin in 2011: The Pull of the Past : When Do Habits Persist Despite Conflict With Motives? [PDF].

They found that people with a strong habit of eating popcorn at movies would eat the same amount of popcorn, whether freshly made or 7-days old and stale, if cued by the context of a movie theatre. The data analysis showed that they ate regardless of hunger and taste – strictly out of habit. People with a weak movie popcorn habit ate much less of the stale popcorn in the movie theatre. And people with a strong movie popcorn habit ate much less of the stale popcorn if they were watching videos in a conference room – the cue of "movie in a movie theatre" was missing.

The question then became, is there a way to stop a person with a strong movie popcorn habit from eating popcorn at the movies? If making the popcorn taste bad doesn’t help, can anything help? The researchers found that a very simple manipulation was surprisingly effective: eating with the non-dominant hand. When right-handed people ate with their left hands and left-handed people ate with their right hands, it didn’t matter how strong their movie popcorn habit was. They ate much less of the stale popcorn in the movie theatre. Using the non-dominant hand took the popcorn eating behavior out of automatic control and put it back into into intentional control. That is, the person’s eating could again be governed by goals such as satisfying hunger, avoiding overfullness, and enjoying the taste of the food.

The non-dominant hand strategy is interesting because it operates without any effort on the part of the person doing the eating (beyond using the non-dominant hand). The subjects in the study didn’t even realize that their popcorn eating behavior was being observed. They thought the study was about personality differences in movie interests. The subjects with a strong movie popcorn habit didn’t know they’d been assessed in this manner (the popcorn eating questions were buried among unrelated questions), and had no idea that eating with their non-dominant hand affected how much they ate. They ate less effortlessly. Without any awareness on their part, their behavior became intentional rather than automatic, and that allowed them to respond in a goal-directed way to the bad taste in their mouth.

Tip: Next time you find yourself snacking in front of the TV (habit cue: TV), eat with your non-dominant hand.

Vigilant Monitoring and Willpower

The usual strategies for behavior change simply don’t work with strong habits. Education and information can change non-habits, but not habits. Study after study has found that strong habits override the best intentions. If you teach principles of nutrition to a person with a strong junk food habit, you just get an educated junk food eater.

Until the popcorn study was done, the only strategy found to be even somewhat effective in stopping cued habit routines was vigilant monitoring and willpower – noticing your impulses and thinking, "Don’t do it!" (Of course, the non-dominant hand technique won’t help with all habits, just habit eating.)

Vigilance and willpower only work as a short term strategy. Over the long term, it’s too tiring and can backfire (as with diets). But a short-term strategy can be useful; it can buy you time.

The other limitation is that vigilance and willpower only work with weak habits. If the habit you want to break is strong, however, there may be a way to weaken its pull. I’ll discuss that next.

Tip: With willpower you can block bad habits long enough to replace old routines with new ones – if you weaken the pull of the habit first.

Weaken Habits with Self-Care

Let’s say you have a habit of stopping at a fast food restaurant for dinner on your way home from work. You know the food isn’t healthy and it doesn’t even taste that good, but when you see the restaurant on your way home, you always stop. Then afterwards, you wish you hadn’t eaten it. Perhaps if you didn’t see the restaurant you wouldn’t be cued, but you can’t get home without driving past it. How do you break this habit?

Remember that the purpose of habit – the reason you have this skill – is to allow you to perform tasks automatically while your brain is free to think about other things (see Part 1). Habits are efficient. They are always your quickest, easiest, and most effortless option. They require no thought. Anything you do instead will take more effort. The outcome of a new behavior may be more rewarding, but the effort of non-automatic action is a an anti-reward and a barrier – especially if you are overtired, under time pressure, or already worn out from pushing yourself. This state of mind magnifies the impact of habit. You may long for a healthy home-cooked meal, but if you haven’t shopped and you’re pressured for time, the fast food habit will win out.

If you want to improve your chances of making it past the fast food restaurant, get adequate sleep, and shop in advance so you can put a meal together quickly after arriving home. Are you reading this and thinking, "I don’t have time to sleep, shop, or cook"? If so, then you need to make some adjustments in your life. Make time for self-care!

I can’t tell you how often new members in the Normal Eating Forum post that they don’t have time to take care of themselves – they have too many things to do, too many other people who need them. They don’t realize that this is exactly why they are emotional eaters. Instead of honoring and attending to their basic human needs, they make do with food band-aids. Self-care is the first responsibility of every adult. Model it for your children!

Tip: Self-care makes you strong. Self-care gives you options.

The third and last article in this series will discuss the most effective habit-breaking strategy of all: avoiding the contexts that cue your habits. It’s not always practical, as I’ll explain, but if you’re in a position to do this, don’t lose the opportunity. Finally, I’ll discuss how to create new and better habits – not anecdotally, but based on the science.

Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear them.

This is Part 1 in a 3-part series on Habit Eating.

(1) How Habits Can Control Your Eating
(2) 3 Proven Strategies for Breaking Habits
(3) 2 Key Principles in Creating New Habits

Sometimes you eat because you’re hungry and the food tastes good. But often you eat because it’s noon and you always eat at noon. Or you just got home and you always eat when you first get home. You may not be hungry and the food may not be tasty, but you eat it anyway. Then afterwards you think, "Why did I eat that? Next time I won’t!" But next time, you do it again.

This is habit eating. Habits are overlearned behaviors that are cued by something in your environment (for example, time of day or just arriving home), and performed automatically with little attention or thought. Habits are not goal-directed – you’re not eating to satisfy hunger or experience taste. So why are you eating??

The Science of Habit

I started thinking about habit eating when I came across an article in the New York Times on the science behind shopping habits. There was a brief mention towards the end about habit eating. The article had no references and mentioned only one scientist’s name, but I found the original studies through internet searches. (There are some inaccuracies in this article, so read it with caution. For example, he says that reward is part of an established habit and this is untrue.)

How habits are formed and broken has been studied by both psychologists and neurobiologists. The neurobiologists study the brains of rats and monkeys, while the psychologists study the behavior of people. They approach the problem from opposite directions, and yet their findings converge.

There are many researchers in this field, but a few names appear again and again. Psychologists David Neal and Wendy Wood did many studies on habit when they were at Duke University, and later the University of Southern California. I’ll discuss their illuminating popcorn study in Part 2 of this series. (Many thanks to David Neal for sending me several helpful articles.) Neurobiologist Ann Graybiel at MIT has done pioneering work on how habits are stored in the brain. It turns out to be the same part of the brain where addictions are formed. Are addictions just habits gone awry?

How Habits Are Formed

To understand how habits are formed, it helps to understand why the brain is capable of habit learning in the first place.As Graybiel discovered, there’s a special place in the brain for habit learning. We’re designed to form habits. Habits are a skill, and it’s a skill that we use. Neal and Wood found that 45% of what we do in a day is habit – automatic, with minimal thought and no particular intention. This is not the "mindful living" ideal of the Zen Buddhists, but it’s an efficient use of brain power. It allows us to do one thing automatically while we think about something else. You can drive a familiar route while planning the speech you’ll make when you arrive because habit learning handles navigation. Without habits, you’d get a lot less done in your day. Habits can serve us, but they also can get in our way.

Habits are overlearned behaviors, repeated and rewarded in the same context many times. Only after many rewarded repetitions will activation shift from the part of the brain where regular learning is stored to where habit learning is stored. The context in which the behavior is performed is part of what’s stored in habit memory. Over time, you learn to associate the context with the behavior. When the behavior (the "routine") becomes a habit, the context becomes a cue for the routine.

The reward is needed to create the habit, but not to maintain it. Once the habit is formed, the reward can be reduced, or even removed for periods of time, and the habit will persist. Habits are learned very slowly, and broken very slowly. They are not goal-directed, or affected by shifting goal states. A habit is a way of dealing with the world that is automated and rigid, and may become less rewarding over time. But as long as it’s working at all, it tends to persist because it’s easy and effortless. Often people go to the same places and do the same things each day, not because they like them so much, but because it’s easier than figuring out what else to do.

Once a habit is learned, it’s never completely unlearned. There are ways to break a habit, but it will reassert itself if you don’t stay vigilant. Habit learning appears to stay in your brain forever, just waiting to be cued.

Emotional Eating versus Habit Eating

Some non-hunger eating is emotional eating, and some is habit eating. It can be tricky to tell the difference. Not knowing why you’re eating doesn’t mean it’s habit eating. It could just as easily mean you’re not in touch with your emotions since that’s the nature of emotional eating. Emotional eaters often don’t know why they’re eating – at least not initially.

People think of emotional eating as comfort eating, but this is not actually its main purpose. The primary purpose of emotional eating is to distract from disturbing thoughts or feelings that you don’t want to allow into your conscious mind. Things like guilt, shame, fear, anger, marital problems – things that disturb you so much that you’d rather worry about being fat. And so you do. Eating is the world’s best distraction since it works on multiple levels. First there is the sensory stimulation – it tastes good. Then there is the obsession. You spend so much time thinking about what you’re going to eat (or not eat), that you hardly have time to think about anything else. And then there is the self-flagellation after eating. If you have any mental energy left over, it’s taken up by feeling fat.

The Normal Eating method (described in my book, Normal Eating for Normal Weight), is designed to ferret out the uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that your mind is working so hard to push down with food. Once you’ve been able to work through them, perhaps with the help of one-on-one counseling, they no longer trigger a desire to eat. Going forward, uncomfortable thoughts and feelings may still occasionally trigger an initial desire to eat (habits are habits), but you’ll know what to do. You’ll know how to figure out what’s really bothering you and address it directly.

So how do you know if it’s emotional eating or habit eating?

• Emotional eating is intentional and random. You are eating in response to a craving. It’s internally motivated and doesn’t depend on context.
• Habit eating is automatic and repetitive. You are eating in response to context and environment. It’s externally cued and depends on context.

Note that you can respond to an emotional eating urge by engaging in habit eating. You can do both at once! If you have a huge fight with your boyfriend then settle down in front of the TV with a pint of ice cream, you’re probably doing both at once.

Sometimes, it’s just habit eating – something you always do in a particular context. The contexts that most frequently cue a habit are location, time of day, preceeding action, and other people. A location cue could be a movie theatre, in front of the television, or anyplace you always (or almost always) eat regardless of hunger. Time of day can cue a habitual snack. Even meal times can cue habit eating if you’ve been snacking and aren’t hungry. An example of "preceding action" as a cue is coming home. Many people head for the refrigerator when they first come home from work or school. People also can cue habit eating. Did you ever have an eating buddy – someone with whom you enjoyed indulging? A 2010 study at Harvard found that the more obese friends you have, the more likely you are to be obese. Perhaps obese people cue habit eating in others (and each other).

Tip: To identify habit eating, look for patterns and repetition. Do you always eat in the same place, at the same time, after doing the same thing, or with the same people? If so, suspect habit eating. But there may be an emotional component, too!

Many studies have been done on how to break bad habits. It’s not easy. The next post in this series will describe three strategies that have been proven to work.

Thoughts? Comments? I’d love to hear them.

This wonderful talk is by Dr. Brené Brown, a researcher professor at the University of Houston, Graduate College of Social Work. It’s entertaining (you won’t be bored!) and touches on some profound truths. Very worth watching!

From the moment you are born, being fed is strongly associated with comfort and love. For infants, food and hugs go together, and that emotional imprinting stays with you for life. Cooking for someone is a way to show love. A box of chocolates is a traditional gift of love on Valentine’s Day. So it’s no surprise that loneliness is one of the most common triggers for emotional eating. Food is an emotional surrogate for love.

Everybody feels passing loneliness now and then, but that’s not the kind of loneliness that people eat over. The kind of loneliness that you eat over is the aching kind that feels never-ending, and grows out of another problem that needs solving. Sometimes loneliness is situational – for example, moving to a new place. But if you’ve had plenty of time to develop social contacts and you’re still lonely, you’re "chronically lonely". That’s the hardest type of all, and the subject of this article.

Why do chronically lonely people often feel lonely even when they’re with other people? Why do they often resist spending time with others? Why do they often find it so unbearable to be home alone in the evening? And what is the solution?

The Problem of Not Liking Yourself

When you’re chronically lonely, just being around other people doesn’t fix it. You can be married and lonely; you can be lonely in a crowd. If you’re chronically lonely, what you lack is authentic connections with other human beings, and generally that’s because you block these connections by not sharing your authentic self. Why?

People who are chronically lonely almost always have as a core problem that they don’t like themselves very much. The give-away is that they generally find it almost unbearable to be alone – especially at night when the distractions of the day are over and it’s quiet. They may even dread turning off the light to go to sleep at night, and procrastinate on that.

Chronically lonely people often have an almost phobic reaction to being by themselves. It feels like falling down a black hole – an awful "dust in the wind" feeling of utter emptiness and alienation from everything and everyone, as though you’re the only person on the planet. If you live alone, you probably avoid going home at night because you can’t bear to be home alone with that feeling. You call it loneliness, but it’s really something else. It’s the horrors; it’s existential alienation. The Big Empty.

Quiet evenings alone are often when emotional eaters binge, perhaps numbing out in front of the TV. They may stay awake until so late that they practically drop from exhaustion, or they may use alcohol to go to sleep so they don’t have to experience their own thoughts lying in bed in the dark.

What is this about? If you can’t bear to be by yourself, it essentially means you can’t bear yourself – you can’t bear your own company, you can’t bear the experience of being "you". That is a huge problem, and it’s also a big block to developing healthy relationships. That’s why it goes along with loneliness and people call it loneliness, but it’s not exactly the same as loneliness.

You can’t stand your own company without distractions because you don’t like yourself. And because you don’t like yourself, you assume no one else will like you either, causing you to shun social contact, making you lonely.

Here’s the good part. I can tell you this for sure. That awful feeling you have about yourself? That horrible feeling that you are flawed and not the same as everyone else? It’s just a feeling. It’s not reality. You are fine! There is nothing wrong with you.

I have worked with many clients, both in the Normal Eating Support Forum and private one-on-one sessions. I’ve known many people who feel worthless, but not one of them ever was worthless – never. They were all beautiful people who were sadly mistaken in their assessment of themselves. The three reasons I see over and over again for serious self-esteem problems are:

• parental neglect or abuse (sometimes not recognized for what it is)
• childhood bullying (most commonly during middle school, ages 12-14)
• growing up gay (because of cultural prejudice)

What these situations (and others like them) have in common is that an innocent child is being told repeatedly that they are wrong or worthless at a time when they do not have the emotional resources to argue with the verdict. That damages self-esteem, but it does not make it true! As an adult you need to recognize this and argue with these old tapes.

You Need Authentic Human Connection

Just being in the proximity of other humans does not cure loneliness. Married people can be lonely. Going to bars and engaging in superficial chit-chat doesn’t cure loneliness. Picking up strangers for sex doesn’t cure loneliness.

The only thing that cures loneliness is authentic human connection. That means allowing another to see you for who you really are and experiencing their acceptance, and seeing another for who they really are and accepting them.

If you don’t like yourself much, it can be scary to let others see the real you. Your impulse will be to hide your real thoughts and feelings under the mistaken notion that the real you is unacceptable and will be rejected. But you’ve got to get past this and take the risk because if you never let anyone see you, you will stay lonely.

That’s not to say you should wear your heart on your sleeve and open up to everyone you meet. Part of good self-care is exercising good judgment and keeping yourself safe. Test the waters with people – make sure they can be trusted with your vulnerable inner self before you reveal too much. Share a little and see what they do with it before sharing more.

One very safe place you can start is the Normal Eating Support Forum. The forum is unique – truly the best support forum on the internet. There is no flaming of any kind, and not a lot of shallow chit-chat or off-topic posts, as in most forums. People talk from the heart about deep personal issues. You can be authentic here, and you can connect. Plus I moderate the forum so you’ll find some good recovery from emotional eating. It’s not just a lot of whining; people make progress. Unlike the blog, the forum is private. Only members have access, and the forum is blocked from all search engines; nothing you type will ever appear in an internet search.

12-step groups are another safe source of support. People are most familiar with AA and NA for alcohol and drug addiction, but there is also a 12-step group for dysfunctional interpersonal relationships such as CoDA, Al-Anon, and SLAA, to name just three. 12-step groups have rules against cross-talk (commenting on what someone else says) and personal attack.

Other types of organizations and groups may offer safe forms of authentic human contact as well. Explore what’s available in your area. The important point is this: Just signing up for activities will not do it. To break through loneliness you need to find places where you can have real heart-to-heart conversations with people who can hear you, understand you, and support you. They do exist!

Have you experienced the kind of chronic loneliness I describe here? Please share your experiences. I’d love to hear from you.

A lot of emotional eaters eat fast – not just a little bit fast, but extremely fast, minimally chewing their food, and raising the next bite to their mouth before the bite they’re chewing is swallowed. Everybody knows the reasons not to do this:

• You barely taste your food or experience having eaten it, and thus need more to feel satisfied.
• Your body doesn’t have time to give you physical cues of satiation, so you eat painfully past full.
• Insufficient chewing causes problems with digestion that are uncomfortable and potentially dangerous.

Slowing down is desirable, but the tricks people use to do this – eat with the opposite hand, count your chews, or (most bizarre) use an iPhone app that rings a bell when you’re allowed to take the next bite – are as “tail wagging the dog” and doomed to failure as dieting to control emotional eating.

If you want to stop emotional eating, you need to understand why you’re doing it and address the underlying issues. If you want to stop fast eating, you need to understand why you’re doing it and address those issues. So why do you do eat so fast?

Why Do You Eat So Fast?

There’s been a lot of discussion about fast eating in the Normal Eating Support Forum. Here are some of reasons members give for fast eating:

“I eat fast, sometimes it’s because my kids are screaming for attention so I shovel it in and carry on but mostly even when I have no distractions I eat fast. I find it hard enough to eat without reading something let alone savour every bite…”

“I was raised in a house where you ate now and tasted it later. Food was not savored (the oldest of us played football and wrestled and could eat an entire box of cereal for breakfast and have room leftover). For me, fast eating is about tucking away the treat that won’t be there because… because. Hmm. Why won’t it be there? I don’t live with my brother any more.”

“I always ate faster than my mom and would get so mad at her because she ate soooo slow and then had to finish her tea and smoke her cigarette before we could leave a restaurant. I rush my kids to hurry up too which is not a good habit to instill in them. I am type A and always in a hurry. I really want to be a calm, moderate sensible person but I am uncomfortable when everything is calm (as much as I want that!).”

“DH called while I was eating. He is on his way home. I suddenly had the urge to finish. Almost like I was in a panic that he would know how late I ate lunch. As if it matters to him.” (Notice the guilt in this quote – more on this in a bit.)

All these descriptions share the themes of anxiety and guilt. Something about eating slowly and mindfully makes these fast eaters feel anxious, guilty, or both. Feelings of anxiety and guilt interfere with the ability to mindfully enjoy the food.

Anxiety and Guilt About Eating

If you want to know what your particular guilt and anxiety in eating is about, the best way to discover this is to eat very slowly for as long as you can bear to do it, and monitor your feelings. What are you thinking about? For example:

• If you’re worried about getting stuff done, then you have a self-care issue. You don’t take time for yourself.
• If you’re worried about someone “catching you” eating – even if this is irrational – then you have guilt about eating.

It’s very common for people to feel guilt about savoring their food – especially if they’re overweight. Often people who are overweight don’t feel they have the right to eat at all, let alone enjoy what they eat.

The guilt is compounded by our culture’s puritanical attitudes towards any sensual enjoyment – the idea that truly high-minded people eat only to fuel their bodies and don’t really enjoy it. The sensual enjoyment of food is considered vaguely obscene. This attitude is not dissimilar to our culture’s attitude towards sex.

So one thing that may help in slowing down is to remind yourself of these two points:

• You have the right to take time for self-care and enjoyment – you don’t have to be productive every waking minute, nor should you be.
• You have the right to savor and enjoy delicious food in all its sensual glory, no matter what your current weight.

But counteracting these negatives just clears the blocks to eating slowly – it doesn’t get you to actually do it. What gets you to actually do it is to focus on the positives, the payoffs.

Slow Eating is a Means, Not an End

I’m a slow eater, and have been for as long as I can remember. But I don’t do it because I read somewhere that I should. I do it because that’s how I enjoy eating. If I eat fast, I get a stomach ache because I can’t chew the food well enough and it sits in my stomach like a lump. Plus I can’t tell when I’m satiated so I overshoot and eat past full, and I hate that feeling. Worst of all, I miss the enjoyment – I don’t get to savor the food as it goes down. Basically, fast eating makes for a much less pleasant eating experience. I want to enjoy my food, not inhale it and end up with a stomach ache.

Though I make no effort to eat slowly, I’m always the last one to finish when I eat with others. In fact, I try to speed up when I’m with others who have finished eating and the entire table is staring impatiently at me. There’s no effort in slow eating for me because it’s the direction of pleasure. I don’t experience any anxiety or guilt when I eat slowly and mindfully, and I’m very attuned to the benefits of slow eating.

In other words, the reason to eat slowly isn’t to eat slowly. It’s not an end in itself that you can achieve through artificial, mechanical tricks. The reason to eat slowly is as a means for savoring your food, making sure your gut feels good as the food goes down, and being in tune with your body’s satiation signals so you don’t inflict pain on your body by overeating. These benefits require mindfulness – paying attention to the taste of your food, the feeling of the food in your gut, and your body’s satiation signals.

If you are busy counting your bites, struggling with a fork in your opposite hand, or listening for an iPhone ding to tell you when to take the next bite, you can’t enjoy your food. How can you pay attention to your eating experience at all with these mechanical distractions to slow yourself down? It’s like trying to eat normally through the artifice of a weight loss diet. It might work temporarily, but eventually it’s just too annoying to sustain.

If you want to sustain a new behavior over the long term, it has to be intrinsically pleasurable. That’s why diets don’t work. And that’s why you need to find the joy in slow eating.

Slow Eating, the Natural Way: Try This!

These mechanical tricks to eat slowly don’t work over the long term any better than a diet, but here’s a suggestion that two forum members found that does work. Pretend you are a restaurant critic and will be called upon to review the food you are eating. Ask yourself, “How does this taste?” Just that will help, but then you may want to go even further. From a forum member:

As noted, asking yourself “how does this taste?” helps. It has helped me slow down somewhat to eat with the intention of reporting on the flavors, textures, and experiences as specifically as possible afterward. Sometimes I try to approach it a little like a food critic (e.g., “Cherries were crisp, but not as tart as expected; maybe going out of season. Flavor was a good counterpoint to crackers, which were flour-y and nicely bland.”).

First clear the way for enjoyment by working on any anxiety and guilt that comes up when you slow down. Once you’ve done this, focusing on the “How does it taste?” question is a good way to put you in touch with the pleasure side of the equation.

Please post your thoughts and experiences. I’d love to hear from you!

Great lecture by Gary Taubes on the true causes of obesity that explodes many common myths – including the widely held belief that obesity is a simple matter of calories in exceeding calories out. You think this is obviously true? It’s not. Watch!

People are overweight either because they eat too much food or they eat the wrong food (too many processed foods, too many sweets). But it is not for lack of knowledge of what to eat, and this is a crucial point. Most overweight people could write a book about nutrition and what they "should" be eating. They know what to do, but they don’t do it. Why?

It’s not that fat people are weak or morally deficient. It’s that there is a compulsive aspect to overeating. Part of it is the physical effect of processed food – sugar, salt, and fat. But this isn’t the whole story, and it’s not even the biggest part of the story because people can and do learn to eat moderate amounts of these types of foods.

The main reason for overeating is emotional eating – stress eating. And here’s the thing: dieting can’t fix that.

Why Diets Don’t Work

The chief characteristic of emotional eating is that it has an involuntary, compulsive quality – it feels like something you are not choosing to do, like something you can’t help but do. If you are overweight due to emotional eating, that is the problem that needs to be solved: the out-of-control eating.

A diet does not solve this problem except in a very temporary way, and then it boomerangs, making the problem worse. A diet adds a tiny bit of resistance to an extremely strong compulsion, but over time strengthens the compulsion by giving a feeling of deprivation. So the longer you are on the diet, the stronger the feeling of deprivation, until eventually you break the diet and eat more than ever.

If you are overweight because of emotional eating, the solution has to be an elimination of the emotional eating, the compulsion itself. Diets strengthen the compulsion, not eliminate it, so they are not the solution. Study after study shows that diets don’t work. More than 95% of dieters regain any weight they have lost plus some.

What does work is to resolve the emotional eating issues, and restore normal eating by reconnecting with natural hunger and satiation cues.

Myths and Facts About Normal Eating

There are some common misunderstandings of what attuned eating means, and also some differences between Normal Eating and other attuned eating programs. Here are some myths and facts:

How to Stop Emotional Eating

Much of the work I do with people in the Normal Eating Support Forum and in private coaching revolves around emotional eating – that maddening, self-sabataging, compulsive behavior that can make people feel crazy and desperate.

The important thing to remember about emotional eating is that this is not something you can fix by buckling down and getting serious about self-control because it’s not a problem of self-control.

You can’t fix a problem unless you understand the true nature of the problem. Emotional eating arises from unresolved stress and unmet needs. And while it doesn’t fix the underlying problem, emotional eating does temporarily ease the discomfort, providing a food band-aid. You can’t expect to permanently remove the food band-aid without addressing the underlying problem in some way. No one can just endure pain.

This is not to say that people know why they are eating. Usually they don’t.

At its core, food is a distraction – perhaps the world’s greatest distraction. First there’s the pleasurable physical sensation, so it’s grabbing you on that most basic level. And then there is the obsessive self-castigation and weight loss attempts afterwards. It’s incredibly effective for pushing other thoughts out of your mind.

Essentially what you do with emotional eating is exchange a very disturbing thought or feeling for the still-disturbing-but-less-so problem of emotional eating.

The process you go through with the Normal Eating method is to undo this distraction, trick your mind into telling you what it’s hiding from you, what is really wrong. Once you know, then you can address the real issues and you no longer need to eat over them. The bonus is that your life improves, too.

Permanently Solve Your Weight Problem

People are frustrated with their weight, and ads for diet programs shout at you from all directions. The ones that sell best promise a fast solution to excess weight with little or no effort: “Lose 10 pounds in 10 days while eating all you want!”

The problem is, these solutions are temporary more than 95% of the time – studies prove it. So you’ll buy their solution, it will work for a while, and then it will stop working. A year from now you’ll be in the same situation and you’ll be in the market for another diet program.

Normal Eating offers a permanent solution, but it’s a harder sell. Here’s what I promise: You can be a normal weight person who comes by it naturally, without worrying about what you eat. It takes 1-2 years and it’s very hard work. You must dive into your soul and and really face who you are. You must confront the core reasons behind your emotional eating, and possibly make some difficult life changes. But if you do that, you will truly be free of the eating and weight problem for the rest of your life. You will become your normal weight without dieting, and you will stop obsessing on eating and weight.

That may sound hard, but if the easier, softer way doesn’t work, perhaps walking through the fire and solving the problem for good and for real actually is the easier, softer way.

If you have questions or comments about Normal Eating, please post them! I would love to hear from you.

It’s holiday time. Those of us in the U.S. had our Thanksgiving feast just a few days ago. Jews around the world are about the celebrate the first night of Channukah, and then right after that is Christmas. No rest for the weary tummy!

There is no better time to return to Normal Eating. That certainly beats stressing out about the holidays and eating yourself sick as you fight with yourself over every mouthful.

The Normal Eating Forum is the companion support group to my book, Normal Eating for Normal Weight. I’ve noticed quite a few old familiar names reappearing in the Normal Eating Forum recently, and it’s so nice to see them again. How about you? Are you struggling with food? Come back to Normal Eating! If you purchased a lifetime membership, you can come back at any time. If you don’t remember your password, you can use the “forgot password” link to retrieve it – assuming you still have the same email address. If you don’t, just email me and I’ll get you set up again. If you’re not yet a member, join us!

Phone Coaching for Personalized Support

The combination of the book and the support forum may be enough to get you on track. But sometimes people get stuck and need more individualized help. That’s where private coaching comes in. I provide coaching by phone at an affordable price to people all over the world. If you’re outside the U.S., we’ll talk via Skype. I’ve got clients in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. Sometimes the time zones can be a little tricky, but usually we can work it out.

Someone recently asked in the forum what to expect, and here’s what I posted in reply. I removed two names to protect anonymity:

Coaching is highly individual – it’s not one-size-fits all like a book. There are certain tools from the program that I use with most everyone because I’ve found them to be so useful – for example, the weight history and the eating experience log. But the content of what we talk about varies as widely as people vary. And sometimes I give individual assignments. [Person-1] talked about how I gave her individualized things to write about and read – I don’t do that with everyone. Everybody’s issues differ, everybody’s needs differ.

Sometimes (not always) I work with some people on the quality of their diet, if it’s really a problem. Some people, as I posted in [Person-2]’s blog, need some amount of structure to their eating for various reasons, at least for a time. We always talk about life more than food, but the eating patterns point to the parts of life that need focus. In the end, both life and eating improve.

The coaching page contains current pricing, and a testimonial from a former client.

If you have questions about Normal Eating, or how to enjoy your holidays without obsessing, stressing, or overeating, please post them! I would love to hear from you.

Recently a new member in the Normal Eating Support Forum posted this message (edited for brevity):

Right now I eat a junkfood diet and have for decades. I don’t eat fruit or vegetables hardly ever. I never learned to prepare dinner every night. I live mostly on pizza, hamburgers and fries, Chick-Fil-A and restaurant food. I also have a sugar jones. I fall asleep, wake up an hour or two later and then when half awake go down and binge on cookies, candy, cake, and other sweets.

I understand stage one is about legalizing all food. I know I have to stop thinking of these foods as “bad” and beating myself for eating them. How can I lose my shame over eating these foods?

She is right that there is no shame in food choices – ever – and that you have the right to eat whatever you want. But she is wrong that the foods she’s eating are not “bad”. They’re pretty bad nutritionally, though she still has ever right to eat them. It’s also not true that the first stage of Normal Eating is “legalizing”. She’s confusing Normal Eating with some other attuned eating programs that I think make a serious mistake.

You Have the Right to Eat Unhealthy Foods

Most attuned eating programs share the concept of “legalizing”, teaching that no foods are good or bad, and chocolate and lettuce are equally valid choices at meal time. The process of legalizing generally involves eating a lot of the “formerly forbidden” food. My observation is that this leads to weight gain – sometimes significant weight gain – that is never lost.

Normal Eating emphatically does not use the term “legalizing” because I think this way of looking at the problem misses the point. The key point is this: You have the right to eat foods that are bad for you. It’s not that you have the right to eat a food because it’s not “bad”. It’s that you have the right to eat it even though it’s “bad”!

The reason this point is crucial is that recovery requires you to recognize both your rights and your responsibilities. If you don’t understand the nutritional value of different foods, you can’t ultimately take responsibility for your food choices – the final goal in Normal Eating.

The main purpose of Normal Eating’s Stage 1, “Reframing”, is to recognize your right to eat whatever you want, healthy or unhealthy, and to reframe it as a self-care issue rather than a moral issue. This is the answer I gave to the woman I quoted above:

Stage 1 isn’t about particular foods not being good or bad, because in fact some foods are better for your health than others – not trying to get you to turn off your common sense here. It’s about recognizing your right to eat whatever you please, good or bad, healthy or not healthy. It’s your body, your life, your choice. You are the only one who can say what is right or wrong for you, or weigh the trade-offs for you. Extreme austerity in food choices for maximum health isn’t what makes everyone happy. Choose what makes you happy, but do it with open eyes, full awareness of trade-offs, and no regrets.

A slice of cake isn’t good for you, but it’s enjoyable, and one piece of cake after a meal of real food won’t significantly harm health. If you have it on a regular basis you may weigh a few pounds more, but that may be worth it to you. When looked at this way it’s an open-eyed choice, in full recognition and acceptance of the downside.

This is very different from saying that cake is as valid a selection for dinner as vegetables, and one is not good and one bad. When you deny cake’s nutritional downside, then you are surprised by its consequences and your choice is not really a choice.

Extreme Junk-Food Diets

Every once in a while, I encounter someone trying to practice attuned eating – waiting for hunger, eating to satiation – while eating a diet that is 100% junk food: For example, soda and a sweet roll for breakfast, snacking on candy throughout the day, noodles and more soda for lunch, pizza or some other fast food for dinner, and no fresh fruits or vegetables at all. (The white flour in noodles, pizza, and most breads – even many breads marked “whole wheat” – is a refined carbohydrate and metabolically indistinguishable from sugar.)

You can’t eat normally if this is what you’re eating. Refined carbohydrates short-circuit the body’s hunger and satiation cues, and also wreak havoc on your blood sugar, further confusing hunger and satiation cues. This would be true if you were subsisting on a natural sugar like honey. When it’s a processed food, like what you get at McDonald’s or in the frozen food section, it’s even worse.

Processed foods are formulated in labs by scientists whose job it is to circumvent your satiation cues so you’ll eat more and buy more. These companies want to make money, and the more you eat the more money they make. Food companies spent millions of dollars on research into how to turn your body wisdom against you, and they are very good at it.

Because of this, when your entire diet consists of processed food – particularly high-carb processed food (candy, soda, noodles, bread, cookies, cake) you cannot rely on internal hunger and satiation cues. Almost anyone eating these foods is going to overeat simply because of what they are eating. Also, eating this way long-term puts you at risk of diabetes and heart disease.

Attuned eating works best when you’re eating real food – fresh meat, vegetables, and fruit, the stuff that spoils in a few days if you don’t eat it. That’s when your body gives you the most accurate hunger and satiation signals. This also happens to be the food that provides the body with the nutrition it needs – not a coincidence.

So how do you get yourself to eat real food after years of eating the fake stuff chemically formulated to take over your mind?

Reawakening Body Wisdom

As soon as you’re able to observe your eating without judgment (the goal of Stage 1), you should move onto Stage 2, “Reconnecting”.

Stage 2 is about reconnecting with yourself both physically and emotionally. On the physical level, the main task of Stage 2 is reconnecting with body wisdom – the part of you that intuitively has a taste for salad when your body needs fiber, or feels like eating carrots when your body needs Vitamin A.

Eating foods that meet your body’s nutritional needs makes you feel really good, physically and emotionally. Your whole body sings. It’s a feeling of profound well-being. Once you experience this, in a conscious way and without the emotional overlay of “I’m on a diet”, you’re going to want that feeling again. This experience is the foundation that eventually allows you to be one of those people who sometimes prefers a salad to a cookie. The way you get there is through food experiments.

In the chapter on Stage 2 in Normal Eating for Normal Weight, there’s a section called “Be a Scientist, Do Experiments”. The first experiment is meant to help people start to move off junk-food diets:

If you always eat similar foods, you may not be able to tell how a food makes your body feel because you have nothing to compare it with. Try pasta for dinner one night, then chicken with veggies the next night, and then cake for dinner the next. All three will satisfy hunger, but they have very different effects on your body. Notice how much better you feel when you eat foods that nourish. If you don’t try it, you can’t know.

The food experiments in Stage 2 are crucial. Don’t skip over this part – I’ve noticed that many people do. Not all the experiments are about eating your vegetables. Read the book for some other things to try out.

Please post your thoughts and experiences. I’d love to hear from you!